As we enter our second decade of its existence, the role of the public cloud is changing. Infrastructure as a service altered the way that virtualised resources are consumed, but what has emerged is far more powerful than allocating compute, storage, and networking on-demand.

The derivative services that the public cloud providers now offer include speech-to-text, sentiment analysis, and machine learning functionality that are constantly being improved. While it is often prudent to run an application on...

Google has announced the launch of GPUs attached to preemptible VMs, offering a 50% discount – but with a catch.

As with the preemptible VMs, first announced in 2015 but with prices significantly lowered in August last year, resources can be used for a maximum of 24 hours. In addition, Google Compute Engine can shut them down with a 30 second warning. The ideal place for these instances is distributed, fault-tolerant...

Leading cloud providers have said they are aware of and working on securing systems after the disclosure of two major chip-level security vulnerabilities earlier this week.

As first reported by The Register, a ‘fundamental’ design flaw in Intel’s processor chips, dubbed Meltdown, was followed by another flaw, called Spectre, found in chips from Intel, AMD and ARM. The latter was confirmed by Google researchers in a blog post

Microsoft’s recent announcement and product update aimed at helping customers migrate from their VMware environments has, unsurprisingly, not gone down very well with the virtualisation giant.

On Monday, as announced in a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft will announce Azure Migrate, a free service, will become broadly available to all Azure customers. The key use case, and one which Corey Sanders, Azure...

Agility is one of the key characteristics that distinguishes a successful managed service provider from the rest of the pack. Being agile means being able to respond quickly to onboard new customers, and fulfill new service requests. Unfortunately, this is often in direct conflict with another important MSP goal: minimizing the number of staff required to deliver those services.

One of the smartest ways to resolve that conflict is to implement your own cloud infrastructure, with customer self-service and...

For those of you following the SD-WAN market, it comes as no surprise that VMware has announced its intent to acquire VeloCloud for an undisclosed amount. So how does it affect the SD-WAN market, and what does the future hold?

Telecoms networks have undergone a big transformation recently, driven by the move from 3G to 4G, long term evolution networks (LTE) and the explosion of IoT connected devices into the market.

Earlier this year, Gartner forecasted that 8.4 billion connected “things” will be in use worldwide in 2017. Mobile devices have also experienced their own transformation, now every bit as powerful and ubiquitous as regular computers. The volume and variety of data...

It is indisputable that containers are one of the hottest tickets in open source technology, with 451 Research projecting more than 250% growth in the market from 2016 to 2020. It’s easy to see why, when container technology has the ability to combine speed and density with the security of traditional virtual machines and requires far smaller operating systems in order to run.

Google has announced a price cut on its local SSD (solid state disk) storage attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines – to the tune of up to 63%.

The latest move from Google will see costs drop by $0.080 per gigabyte per month in the majority of US regions for on-demand VMs, while the company also announced prices were being lowered on preemptible VMs.

Local SSD is a high performance, physically attached block storage offering, and can be the most viable option for workloads such as...

Consumers’ expectations for always-on technology are continually increasing, with businesses looking to see where they need to make changes to support this. Users expect their applications to be available and functioning at optimal performance, considering it almost a basic human right, with even the most minor disruptions a cause for uproar.

Categories

Cloud Tech promotes industry thought leadership content from industry brands, businesses and analysts, partnering with writers and bloggers to deliver insight and advice on cloud IT strategy to our extensive audience of CIOs and IT managers.